Report: Illinois businessman Khan to buy St. Louis Rams

Illinois businessman Shahid Khan plans to buy the St. Louis Rams, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

Khan is the owner and president of Flex-N-Gate Corp., an auto parts manufacturer based in Urbana, Ill. A message left at his office by the St. Louis Business Journal was not immediately returned. A woman who answered the phone at the Khan residence in Champaign, Ill., said he was out of town.

Khan plans to buy the 60 percent of the team owned by Chip Rosenbloom and his sister, Lucia Rodriguez, according to a report by Bernie Miklasz in the Post-Dispatch. The siblings inherited the club from their late mother Georgia Frontiere in 2008.

Khan is committed to keeping the Rams in St. Louis, unnamed league sources told Miklasz. Flex-N-Gate was incorporated in 1956 to produce stock racks for pick-up trucks and today makes bumpers, pedals, grills, hinges and other auto parts for Chrysler, Ford, Honda, BMW and other car makers. The company has about $2 billion in revenue and 9,500 employees at 48 manufacturing and nine product development and engineering facilities throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Spain.

Billionaire Stan Kroenke, owner of the Denver Nuggets basketball team and Colorado Avalanche hockey franchise, owns the remaining 40 percent of the Rams. It's unclear if he plans to retain his minority stake. A call to Kroenke seeking comment was not immediately returned.

The other NFL owners would need to approve the sale.

Rosenbloom and Rodriguez also considered an offer from a group led by St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts. Eric Gelfand, a spokesman for Checketts, declined to comment.

In October, John Shaw, former Rams president and now an adviser to Rosenbloom and Rodriguez, told NFL owners at a meeting in Boston that a decision on the club’s future ownership would be made by the end of the football year at the end of February.

Kevin Demoff, executive vice president for football operations and chief operating officer for the Rams, declined to comment.